News

Facebook Loses Its Major Fact-Checking Partner Snopes After 2 Yrs

The famous fact-checking organization, Snopes has announced the end of its partnership with Facebook where it undertook the job of curbing misinformation and fake news on the platform.

Facebook has ramped up its effort since the 2016 US presidential election where Russia’s social media influence came into focus — to stop the spreading of false information on the social media platform.

Snopes, along with other fact-checking partners such as ABC News, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, and PolitiFact helped Facebook in identifying and informing users about questionable stories or debunking fake news shared by their friends.

In 2017, Facebook paid Snopes about $100,000 for their work, but now the fact-checking group says it is “evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services.”

Snopes says the Facebook partnership was taking up too much of time from their small staff and that they’d serve the online community in a better way by creating fact-checking tools. Such fact-checker tools could benefit the entire web instead of just one platform.

“We want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff,” Snopes wrote in a statement.

The organization had stopped debunking posts at the end of last year when its contract with Facebook expired, and efforts to negotiate a renewal have been unsuccessful so far.

While Snopes hasn’t closed the door on working with Facebook or other such companies again, it urged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to meet “with fact-checkers as part of his recently announced series of public discussions” in 2019.

To Top

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This